Send Down the Rain

by Charles Martin

You can kill my body and you’d be doing me a favor, but kill my soul and there’s no remedy for the pain. And when you’re in that place, and the pain is real bad, and you’ve been leaning into the thing causing it so long that you don’t know how to do anything other than lean, hope and hopelessness blur and you lose sight of who’s trying to hurt you and who’s trying to help. Sometimes you need somebody to stand between you and the sharp thing that hurts. To lean for you. I touched her hand. “It’ll be okay.”

Hope has a funny way of cracking people down the middle. Cutting through the tough places.

When people become afraid on a soul level, when the terror of their lives has taken up residence in their belly, it becomes the wall behind which they sequester themselves.

Healing comes in both the telling and the hearing.

“Sir, we live in an angry, evil world. Where stuff doesn’t always make sense. Where hope seems like something we did when we were kids and the love we cling to slips through our fingers like cold water, but”—I tapped my chest—“nothing that happens here today changes the fact that love heals the shattered places.” I shook my head once. “It’s the only thing that can—” The faces in the courtroom held steady on mine. “It’s the only thing worth fighting for,”

Sometimes I stand on the beach and cry for no reason. No reason at all. Allie found me one afternoon and asked me why. I said, “The place where the tears come from is full again.”